Will Rachel Maddow face a reckoning over her Trump-Russia coverage?

by ROSS BARKAN

The siren song of ratings is too difficult for a TV personality ignore.’ Photograph: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Image

The worst-kept secret in the liberal media ecosystem is that Donald Trump
is great for business. Rebranded for the resistance, liberal newspapers
gobbled up thousands of new subscribers while local outlets die across
America, unable to feast on the Trump manna. On television, left-leaning
stations, at long last, competed with Fox in the ratings game, fueled
by a never-ending Trump obsession.

With Trump has come Russia: two years of conspiracy-mongering about
whether the president, a failed real estate mogul and reality TV star
consumed with dubious deal-making, conspired with the Russian government
to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Robert Mueller’s
determination that no evidence exists to prove Trump and Russian
colluded to fix the election has exposed, once again, the venality of
A-list political punditry. At the top of the heap is none other than
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

Maddow, of course, was not alone. The New Yorker once ran a cover in Russian,
a stunt that will age as terribly as all cold war-era red-baiting has
to our 21st-century eyes. Last year, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait
baselessly posited (in another cover story) that Trump may have been a Russian “asset” since 1987. CNN was a daily carousel of Russiagate pundits.

“We wrote a lot about Russia,
and I have no regrets,” said the New York Times’ executive editor, Dean
Baquet, in an interview after the Mueller report came in. “It’s not our
job to determine whether or not there was illegality,” he added. Other
news executives have also defended their coverage. CNN’s president, Jeff
Zucker, said: “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our
role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we
did.”

Still, it’s abundantly clear now that many liberal outlets overdid it
in their fervor. And Maddow, MSNBC’s ratings juggernaut of the Trump
era, is the embodiment of this overzealousness. The Mueller
investigation was covered more on MSBNC
than any other television network, and was mentioned virtually every
day in 2018. No twist was too minuscule or outlandish for Maddow; every
night, seemingly, brought another nail in the coffin of the
soon-to-be-dead Trump presidency.

There was the time Maddow theorized that Trump was “curiously well-versed”
in “specific Russian talking points”, strongly implying press briefings
were dictated from the Kremlin. An American missile attack on Syria,
Maddow concurred, could have been orchestrated by Putin himself. During a cold snap, the Russian government could shut down our power supply. Putin could blackmail Trump into pulling troops from Russia’s border.

Maddow was not only certain that Russians had rigged the election. On
air, she would talk about the “continuing operation” – the idea that
the Kremlin was controlling the Trump presidency itself. In more sober
times, this brand of analysis would barely cut it on a far-right
podcast. In the Trump era, it was ratings gold.

Maddow is much smarter than this. But the siren song of ratings is
too difficult for a TV personality ignore, especially when a television
network is transformed from an also-ran into a top contender.

This
is not to say, of course, Trump is not a future criminal and the
Mueller investigation didn’t perform a service. Paul Manafort, Trump’s
former campaign manager, and Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal
attorney, are headed to prison. Trump’s conflicts of interest are almost
comical. Between the dubious family business dealings and Cohen’s hush
money to porn star Stormy Daniels, there’s plenty of material for
prosecutors in New York to investigate. Did Trump, in his reckless
stupidity, obstruct justice? It’s possible.

But none of it will have to do with a fantastic collusion case.
Rather, it will concern old-fashioned, sloppy corruption of the type
Trump and his ilk – greedy pols and fraudulent businessmen – have
engaged in for generations. It’s more destructive and more banal. It
will not end his presidency, because federal prosecutors have reached a consensus that a sitting president probably cannot be indicted. Once Trump is out of office, the prosecutorial wheels can keep turning.

The case of Russian collusion served as soma for the Democratic
masses addicted to cable TV and prestige news outlets, where the story
could never die. Focus enough on Trump’s “illegitimate” presidency –
Russian agents installed him! – and forget the catastrophic failure of
the Democratic party to elect Hillary Clinton and stop Trump’s shambolic
candidacy.

Forget too America’s structural inequities, its warped version of
representative democracy, its original sins of slavery and Native
American genocide, and its history, first and foremost, of elevating
presidents who routinely flouted the constitution, whether it was
Franklin Roosevelt imprisoning Japanese Americans, Abraham Lincoln
suspending habeas corpus, or even George W Bush launching the Iraq war, a
cataclysmic blunder that will reverberate across the Middle East for
decades to come.

All
of this is easy to wave away with the Trump-Russia wand. In this
mythos, America was an unsullied country until Kremlin power brokers
dropped Trump in the White House to control from afar. It is the cold
war paradigm reborn, Russia the dark nemesis that must be slayed. Just
as conservatives once ranted about communist infiltrations into all
facets of American life, it’s liberal Democrats who now see Russia in
every Trump foible.

Maddow surely understands this. There will be no deus ex Russia to
save the American republic. Once Mueller’s name fades into history, she
will have to find someone else to fill her primetime hours.

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, April 9th, 2019 at 00:03 and is filed under Uncategorized.
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